Nice picture. What does the product do?
Jack Butcher is a designer and artist who spent years working in advertising. He went on to start Visualize Value, a project built around explaining ideas through simple black-and-white images.
That sounds straightforward until you try it. How do you draw something you can’t hold, like progress or the value of someone’s work? You have to decide what you want another person to understand before you start choosing shapes and colors.
One lesson from Jack’s course helped us look at how we explain Capture, the app we’re building. But first, imagine opening a website for something you’ve never heard of.
You like the picture. You’re still confused.
The page looks great. You enjoy the illustration and scroll through a few screenshots. Then you close it, and someone asks what the product does. You’re not quite sure.
The person who made the page may know the product so well that the connection feels obvious. You arrived without any of that background. A picture can catch your attention while leaving the explanation unfinished.
In his lesson on explaining a service, Jack suggests showing the change between two situations. What was happening before, and what becomes possible afterward? He pairs that with clear language that tells people what is actually being offered.
Our reading is that a good place to start is the moment someone needs help. A person looking for a way to remember an idea needs to recognize their problem before a screen full of features means much to them.
A runner dragging a filing cabinet
Capture is an app where you can put down rough thoughts without organizing them first. It groups related thoughts together and separates things you need to do from things you’re still thinking about.
For one illustration, we pictured a runner dragging a filing cabinet. It’s an invented scene: someone trying to move while hauling around a system for keeping everything in order. We wanted to give the burden of organizing your thoughts a physical shape.
But someone could enjoy that picture and still have no idea what Capture does. We would need to show the next part: a thought going into the app and what happens to it afterward.
That gives us a possible sequence to try. Start with the awkward situation, then show the actual product handling a clearly labeled example. Let the picture introduce the problem and the demonstration explain how the app helps. We haven’t completed or tested that sequence yet, so we don’t know how clearly it will come across.
Try explaining one small change
You can try our version of this exercise with something you make or do. Describe the situation someone is in before they come to you, then the change you help them make. Keep it small enough to show honestly.
Choose a picture or example that helps explain that change. Show it to someone unfamiliar with your work and ask what they think you’re offering. Give them time to answer before filling in the gaps yourself.
They might see something you never intended. That answer gives you a place to start the next version.
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Reading notes: Based on Jack Butcher’s “Visualizing the Value of a Service”, from How to Visualize Value. Background comes from Visualize Value’s About page. The Capture illustration, proposed demonstration, and exercise are our application of the lesson, not Jack’s work or endorsement.
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